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About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Saturday, January 31, 2015

Today, I drove up past Baltimore to the train show on the
Maryland State Fairgrounds at Timonium, off I-83. Parking was very full (except in another lot
behind the Exhibition Hall, which wasn’t used, as the exhibit was in an agricultural
hall on the north side of the grounds).

This was perhaps the largest train show in floor space I’ve
ever seen, and most of the exhibits were larger than usual.

The most complicated exhibit belonged to club in Hartford
County, but some yellow “rope” made it difficult to get “realistic” shots with
the camera held close to the exhibit.

MARRS (The Meade Area Railroad Society) had a large exhibit,
with one very long straight stretch with little scenery, but in one area there
was a castle right out of “The Lord of the Rings”, which I don’t think has
trains (whereas Harry Potter’s world does).

There was a smaller area exhibit of European trains.

There was also an exhibit from a Baltimore club with a
curious combination: a replica of the monorail at Disney World in Orlando, but
in the same layout there was a model of Fort Holabird, MD, the Quartermaster
Corps, with eyebrow barracks resembling those I lived in during Basic Training
in 1968!

A note: vendors, at least some, didn't take credit cards. You needed to bring cast (there was an ATM).

Sunday, January 25, 2015

Today, I attended a Fathom broadcast of “Swan Lake” by Pyotr
Tchaikovsky, Op. 20, originally composed in 1875-1876 (which the composer was
in his mid 30s).

Wikipedia explains that Tchaikovsky questioned the practice
of “specialty composition” of ballet, and took the work as symphonic in
scope. However, there are various
versions of both the choreography and music, one of the most controversial
having been developed in 1895 by Petipa, Ivanov and Drigo.

The broadcast today was said to be live from the Bolshoi in
Moscow, which would be 8 hours ahead.
Since it started at 1 PM, it must have been performed at 9 PM tonight in
Moscow, which is late.

The choreography is by Yuri Grigorovich, based on Marius
Petipa. There were pre-show and
intermission interviews by Katya Novikova.
The cast comprises Denis Rodkin as Prince Siegfried, Svetlana Zahkarova
as the fated Odette.Odile, Artemy Belyakov as the sorcerer, and Igor Tsvirko as
The Fool. The Bolshoi Theater Orchestra was conducted by Pavel Sorokin.

As presented, the action was compressed into two acts, with
several scenes. The basic controversy
concerns the tragic ending, which according to the notes Tchaikovsky wanted,
but which was not allowed to be shown (for “propaganda” reasons) until
2001. The story incorporates the idea of
Odette’s having a doppelganger, Odile, and prince Siegried’s marrying Odile
when Odette has been turned into a swan.
At the end, Siegfried realizes he has been duped, and apparently drowns
himself.

The music, as performed today, dies away quietly into a soft
ending. The usual performance end in
great triumph, with the music switching its main theme to the Picardy B Major
and ending in a kind of empty yet powerful triumph. A number of horror and dramatic films
recently have played the doppelganger idea, and the most important is, of
course, Darren Aronofsky’s own “Black Swan” (reviewed on the Movies blog Dec.
3, 2010). In that film, the triumphant music crashes at the end, with great
irony as the doppelganger ballerina dies on a public ballet stage. The triumphant music actually works in
combination with horror and tragedy, as if to hollow it out. The film (along with Anderson’s “There Will
Be Blood”) is a favorite among many younger classical musicians.

I think if you want to play the quiet ending to the stage
action, fine. But then play the 5-minute
orchestra suite conclusion, with the closing bombast, during the bows, to give
the audience the right effect.

In the performance above, of the conclusion of the Suite.
Tonu Kalum conducts the University of North Carolina Orchestra (at Chapel Hill)
in Memorial Hall at UNC in December 2012, where a college orchestra plays the
music like a major city orchestra would.
This interpretation gets the majestic conclusion and the effect exactly
right. Note the drawing out of the final drumbeat before the last octave crashes.

As shown, the Bolshoi performance today seems almost like a
political protest, against Valdimir Putin’s aggression (in the Ukraine) and
support of the “anti-gay propaganda law”, which seems predicated in many ways
by Russia’s low birth rate, and the fear that young adults will be persuaded by
western “propaganda” not to have the children and big families that the country
needs. That presumes adults can’t think
for themselves and are so easily influenced.
Imagine the ending: instead of
fertility (in the marriage in the happy ending where the sorcerer is defeated
and the real Odette returns from “being” a swan), the prince is himself sterile
and suicidal, as is the “swan”, a caricature of what Putin fears is happening
to Russia.

There is a full length version, 2014, on YouTube with the
Bolshoi, ending with the triumphant music, here. So why did Bolshoi change the music for
Fathom? It does appear though, that in the visuals, at the very end the prince
keeps Odette from the Sorcerer.

Much of the rest of the music seems episodic, with many short
numbers (even though Tchaikovsky wanted his ballet music to have more form and
seriousness). There were some irritating
interruptions for applauses. At one point, a team "flower" dancer actually fell.

The pre-show did include a view of the Bolshoi outside, and
often there are light shows.

Friday, January 23, 2015

It may be a stretch to consider a visit to a science museum
like a “stage event” for this blog, but for me the effect is the same. I missed the visit to Epcot (and the “Mars
trip”) in December and hope to do it in the spring, but I found some of the
same materials in the science museums in Baltimore and then Philadelphia. These contain material not found in the
Smithsonian in Washington.

Baltimore’s (the Maryland Science Center, link in the Inner Harbor, not too far from the
stadiums for the Orioles and Ravens) best exhibit is “Life Beyond Earth”. I see I covered it Dec. 17, but I'll summarize again today for some comparison. There are many artistic renditions of what
other extrasolar planets and other moons and surfaces in our own Solar System
look life. Furthermore, there is a globe
upon which the museum can project the surfaces of (besides Earth in various
seasons) many planets and moons in our own solar system with surprising detail
(this includes Titan, Io, Triton, and Europa as well as planets like Mars and
Venus) as well as several hypothesized extrasolar planets (as in the Gliese
systems). There are regular showings of
these projections. There is also a
biology exhibit: “Cells, the Universe Inside Us”.

But even bigger (and a little more expensive) is the
Franklin Institute in Philadelphia (link), within long walking distance of the 30th Street Station on Amtrak. (It’s about two miles from the City
Center.) The museum occupies three
floors in a 1930’s art deco building, and when I visited it yesterday there
were hundreds of kids on field trips. I
felt like a sub again. They were
certainly having a good time.

Franklin doesn’t have as much about alien worlds in its
exhibit areas as does Baltimore, but it does have a lot about the NASA Apollo and
various other missions, and furthermore it may have the best big-screen film
right now showing the surfaces of other planets in the Solar System, “Wildest
Weather in the Solar System”, oddly shown on a planetarium screen. It also has an Omnimax and a regular 3-D
theater. When you buy an admission
ticket, extra movies are “extra” but reduced in price. But the best exhibits at Franklin are the
biological. There is a “maze” (or "Fantastic Voyage", as in the 1966 movie) in walking through
a big model of heart and lungs (with a large amount of stair climbing) that
actually takes some time to get through.
(NBC Washington has had a smaller such exhibit at its health
fairs.) There is an even more impressive
“maze” of the neural circuits in the human brain, simulated in a number of nets
that you climb around it.

Visitors can also try the Virginia Air and Space Museum in
Newport News (in the Tidewater, SE of Williamsburg), which offers some
extraterrestrial landscapes.

And a nice surprise is a museum at the Meteor crater in
Odessa, Texas, with its globes of Mars and Venus.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

When I was a senior in high school, on that wonderful Mt.
Washington trip in May 1961, I told people that Sibelius was my favorite
composer.

I dug out the performance of the Symphony #5 in E-flat, Op.
82 (1919), on Sony-Columbia with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by
Esa-Pekka Salonen from 1987.

The work went through several versions, and for all its
ascetic romanticism, it’s still enigmatic.
The first movement combines a conventional “Sonata” with a scherzo. The slow movement is a song without words,
and the finale has that “3/2” march which ends in the famous six loud
chords.

When I was finishing high school, I thought of various
symphonies as “musical pictures” of favorite friends of mine, and the Sibelius
Fifth was at one point the favorite of all.

The CD also has a performance of Pohjola’s Daughter, Op. 49,
which dies away (in B-flat) after flirting with majesty.

Earlier, though, I had learned by ear some of the earlier
ones. I had a Monteux RCA recording of
the Sibelius Symphony #2 in D (Op. 43), which I got for Christmas in 1960 (of
my senior year). That saga-like second
movement became a symbol for winter, which that year featured and Inauguration
Day Blizzard (when John F. Kennedy would say, “Ask Not…”). The
Finale has another famous majestic 3/2 “march”. (Robert Schumann had penned a “March”
in ¾ at the end of his “Carnaval” for piano.)

But in my junior year, I had become familiar with the
Symphony #1 in E Minor, Op. 39, which “critics” had complained was too much
like Tchaikovsky. The use of tonality is
interesting. The Sonata firm first
movement first presents the majestic second subject in the dominant B Major,
and in G Major in the recapitulation, before crashing back to E Minor. The second movement again is a song one half
step lower (in E-flat). The finale has a
“big tune”, appearing to end the work in the Dominant B Major, beore the work
crashes to tragedy back in E Minor. I remember that weekend in New Hampshire,
we did a hike up “Rattlesnake Mountain” near Bear Camp Pond (near Sandwich,
NH), and that “big tune” played in my head as we came to the climactic view of
the “nighthike”.

My other best friend, a Dvorak lover, claimed “The music of
Sibelius is musically sterile.”

I see that on March 1, 2013, here, I covered the Symphony
#7.

Finland has always been an interesting, enigmatic
country. In my novel, an “alien”
artefact is discovered near the Russo-Finnish border and smuggled back into the
US, where the consequences of its influence are then felt. Putin just could have designs on the area.

Sunday, January 11, 2015

Today, Timo Andres gave a piano recital in the Music Room at
the Phillips Collection near Dupont Circle in Washington DC. Timo (who lives in Brooklyn NY) has returning
from a “road trip” where he had “played” at UNC Chapel Hill and then in Raleigh
NC three nights, and then an “afternoon game” in Washington (about four miles
from Nationals Park, thank you) – risky in the winter, more so in the South
than in areas that are used to snow and ice.
I-95 in bad weather is not fun.

He had played George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” (E Major) and his
own second piano concerto, called “Old Keys” with the North Carolina
Symphony. I didn’t make it down there,
given the weather and all the distracting news, but I want to hear “Old Keys” as
soon as possible, maybe online if necessary.
I understand he is working on another concerto for Jonathan Biss, and I
think there has been mention of a violin concerto, or did I just dream that.

His concert today opened with “At the River”, reviewed here
earlier April 5, 2013. I can only add
that I was struck again by the gradual progression from Debussy-like
Rosicrucian impressionism, into expressionism, with an odd (though ultimate
quiet conclusion) where it seems like some music sounding like “Modern Family”
is harmonized in lush twelve-tone, Schoenberg style, over a descending ground
bass figure. (The notes say that the
chorale theme is predicated on the church hymn “Shall We Gather at the River?”)
There are lots of delicious sextuplets in the high registers all along. Timo is a part of a group of young NYC
composers called “the Six Sleeping Giants” – and, no, I can’t name “Les Six”
from France right now.

The rest of the concert comprised an alternation of three Impromptus
by Franz Schubert, each followed by an Etude by Philip Glass, known from his
characteristic and repetitious film scores (like “Koyaanisqatsi”, “Kundin”, “The
Hours” ). Glass had contributed a piano piece to the film “Stoker”. Andres asked the audience to "hold applause" until after the last of the sequence of six pieces.

The Schubert impromptus were F Minor, Op. 142 #1, A-flat
Major, Op. 142 #2, and C Minor. Op. 90 #1. All three end quietly. The first is almost like a “concert overture”
for piano. The A-flat is not the more
familiar one in the same key from Op. 90 that starts with arpeggios in A-flat
minor, which I played when I took piano.
The third of these was the most familiar.

The Glass Etudes (14, 16, and 20) sounded like they were in
G Minor, A-flat, and F minor. They were
tonal, and did not have as much dissonance as most contemporary music. (The Ligeti etudes, reviewed last summer, are more dissonant.) As an encore, Mr. Andres played another Glass
impromptu, which I believe was in C Minor.
All of the pieces ended quietly.

Let me mention one of my favorite Schubert implementations: the film "Sunshine" (2000), by Istvan Szabo, about three generations of a Jewish family in Hungary (enduring the Nazis and then Soviet occupation), from Paramount and Alliance Atlantis, with the Schubert 4-hand Fantasy in F Minor (D940) in the background used most effectively.

The concert did sell out.

The music room is darkly lit, since there are oil originals
all around – every room in the museum has a humidifier, and of course no flash
photography can be allowed. I had
attended a couple concerts there way back in late 1962 when I was a “patient”
at NIH. (It’s in a separate building –
the museum has several – on the second floor;
there is a larger auditorium, too.)
The piano sound had tremendous dynamic range but the top notes could
have used a little more ring – maybe it’s a function of room acoustics, or of
70-year-old inner ears.

Update: Jan 15

Timo does a cooking show for XOXO cooks in Brooklyn, link here, fixing a steak salad. Will he get on one of the big daytime shows, like Ellen, Meredith, or Rachel? The eclectic chamber music in the background is familiar, but I'm not sure which piece.

Saturday, January 03, 2015

The number of people – especially kids – taking piano
lessons has plummeted, as have sales of traditional upright and console pianos
(let alone grands). The Minneapolis Star
Tribune has a discouraging story today (by David Pitt of the AP) about a store
closing in Bettendorf, Iowa (Quad Cities) when there were still no more
competitors left, link here.

I had a Kimball console from 1952 (when I started lessons)
until 2003, when I gave it away in Minneapolis, before returning to Arlington
VA to look after Mother. It had gotten
banged up a bit and was rather out of tune.

In 2011, shortly after her passing, I bought a Casio (all 88
keys) , for direct input into Sibelius.
Rather than assembled the stand with it, I put it up on sawhorses, which
seems to be just the right height. (It
seems like a lot of users don’t assemble them.)
It plays almost like a real piano and in natural mode makes an
outstanding tone with a real overtone ring. The pitch is always a perfect match to
recordings.

It seems that kids like to buy the electronic pianos, but
for someone serious about piano as a possible major life activity, you need the
real thing.

Let me note another milestone, recently getting my
“Polytonal Prelude” (in D and E) entered more properly into Sibelius. I am still on 7.0 with Mac 10.6.8, but I am
expecting an upgrade my mid January. The
newer environment will, I hope, make some things easier. I’ll get into my plans in more detail again
soon.

Today’s “concert” music is a Naxos CD of piano music by
Swedish composer Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871-1927), played by Niklas Sivelov (1996
recording).

The Three Fantasies (Op. 11) rather resembled a mixture of
Schumann, Brahms, and big Chopin (the style of the Ballades). The first, “molto appassionato” in B Minor
comes across as “another” majestic Chopin “scherzo”.

But the remaining short pieces (“Late-Summer Nights”, Op.
33, and the Three Small Piano Pieces), are much like Schumann miniatures. The last of the small pieces, a polka, is
familiar: I believe my second piano
teacher taught it (to another student) when I was in high school; I’ve definitely heard it performed live.

The CD includes the Impromptu in G-flat (I prefer to call it F-sharp), and the
twenty-minute G Minor Sonata (there are five, but this seems to be the only one
published and performed). The work is
again rather like a Schumann sonata. The
third movement has a nice trio, and its odd to see to movements in a row marked
Allegretto (with the finale). The ending
is vigorous but it does not go into the Picardy major, but remains stormy at
the very end.

Richard Wagner actually composed a few early sonatas, said
to be hard. The first, in A-flat, is in
one movement and is on YouTube. It is rather quiet. There is also an early Symphony in C on YouTube, played by the Rundfink Symphony and Rogner, link here. The opening rather resembles Franz Schubert.

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